Aideen O'Kelly

Aideen O'Kelly (5 September 1936 – 22 April 2015) was an Irish actress who worked in theatre, film, and television across Ireland and the United States. Born in Dalkey, a suburb of Dublin, she was the daughter of Dermod O'Kelly, an accountant, and Florence Ledwidge, who worked for the Dublin Gas Company. Her sister Emer O'Kelly later became a theatre critic.

O'Kelly's stage training began in Ireland under director Ernest Blyth, who sent her to the Aran Islands as a teenager to strengthen her spoken Irish in preparation for performing at the Abbey Theatre. She went on to appear in several Abbey productions, among them The Plough and the Stars in 1966 and The Playboy of the Western World in 1968. In 1984 she took the role of the Mother Superior in a Dublin staging of Agnes of God, and she later appeared in a London production of The Plough and the Stars in the 1990s, directed by her Abbey colleague Joe Dowling. In 1990 she contributed an article to Backstage recounting her experiences meeting Samuel Beckett.

O'Kelly relocated to the United States in 1979 and established a substantial presence on the New York stage. Her Broadway career spanned from 1980 to 1994, with credits including A Life, which ran in 1980 and 1981, Othello in 1982, and Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1994, the latter alongside Milo O'Shea. In Othello she played Emilia opposite James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer, a performance for which she received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play. Broadway caricaturist Al Hirschfeld drew O'Kelly three times, capturing her in her roles in A Life, Othello, and Happy Days.

Beyond Broadway, O'Kelly appeared frequently in off-Broadway productions, including Samuel Beckett's Happy Days in 1987, Frank McGuinness's Baglady, Stephen Jeffreys' The Libertine in 1998, and Joseph O'Connor's Red Roses and Petrol in 2000. She was also a regular presence at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York. New York Times critic Mel Gussow, reviewing her performance in Happy Days, noted that she conformed closely to the physical outline suggested by Beckett and described her as bringing an amiable, almost chipper quality to the role of Winnie.

O'Kelly's screen work spanned both sides of the Atlantic. In Ireland she won a Jacob's Award for best actress in 1970 for a television role. She appeared in televised versions of A Life in 1984 and Playboy of the Western World in 1983, and her American television credits included episodes of Third Watch, Law & Order, and the soap opera Another World. Her film roles included parts in Boyd's Shop in 1960, Family Business in 1989, and A Perfect Murder in 1998. She also appeared as herself in Still Dreaming, a 2014 documentary about the Lillian Booth Actors Home.

O'Kelly was married to Eoin Troy; the couple later divorced. She had four children: Judith, Orla, Kevin, and David. After moving to the United States she converted to Judaism. She died on 22 April 2015 at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey, at the age of 78.